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Updated: June 11, 2025
The great morose dreamer, contemplative and grave as Wordsworth, must have made more direct and intimate appeal to Corot's soul than the charm and the gaiety of Hobbema's water-mills. Be this as it may, it was Holland that revived the long-forgotten science of values in the Barbizon painters.
His landscapes have in this way a Wordsworthian directness, simplicity, and severity. They are not troubled and dramatic like Turner's. They are not decorative like Dupré's, they have not the solemn sentiment of Daubigny's, or the airy aspiration and fairy-like blitheness of Corot's.
One of the best known of the works of the master, executed during the transitional period, when he still gave great attention to detail. With all this variety, however, the true value of Corot's work lies in the expression of the spirit of the man himself.
Among the moderns, Corot's portrait of himself is one of the most memorable, but Fantin Latour, Flandrin, Leon Bonnat, and Lenbach are all strong and modest; which one cannot say of our own Leighton. Among the later English heads Orchardson's is notable, but Mr. Sargent's is disappointing.
I am done now go and do what you want." The words are authentic, being taken down from Corot's own lips; and they sound singularly like that remark made to Alfred Tennyson by his grandfather, "Here is a guinea for your poem, and depend upon it, this is the first and last money you will ever receive for poetry."
An American millionaire buys a "Corot" or a "Monet," that is to say, a piece of colored canvas upon which a highly individualized artistic temperament has recorded its vision or impression of some aspect of the world as it has been interpreted by Corot's or Monet's eye and brain and hand.
To those who were inclined to undervalue the pure, sweet spirit which shone through his work, and to complain of the representation of a world in which no breeze stronger than a zephyr blew, in which the birds always sang, and the shepherd piped to a flock unconscious of the existence of wolves, there were shown efforts in so many and various directions as to forever silence their reproach of monotony, so often directed against Corot's work.
It was Corot's good fortune to meet at the start a young landscape painter, Michallon, who had lately returned from Rome, where he had gone after winning the prize for historical landscape, which then formed part of the curriculum of the École des Beaux Arts.
You'll find blank cheques in the upper right-hand drawer of my desk there; fill in one to my order, and the Corot's yours." For a moment longer the prince stared, hate and perplexity in equal measure tincturing his regard. Then slowly the look of doubt gave way to the ghost of a crafty smile. Such fatuity seemed incredible. Yet there it was, egregious, indisputable.
There was no market then for Corot's wares, and the artist would have doubted the sanity of any one who might have wanted to buy. His income was one dollar a day and this was enough. If he wanted to go anywhere, he walked; and so he walked into Barbizon one day, his pack on his back, and found there a little inn, so quaint and simple that he stayed two days.
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